The Supreme Court has refused an appeal from so-called Chuck E. Cheese's murderer Nathan Dunlap, opening the door for a Colorado judge to schedule the state's first execution in over 15 years.
The killing of four employes in a Chuck E. Cheese's in 1993 was a massacre that scarred the people of Aurora, Colo., long before shooter James Holmes opened fire in a crowded movie theater on July 20, 2012. Holmes killed 12 and wounded dozens more.

Dunlap, 38, is one of three men on the state's death row. He was sentenced to death in 1996, but the victims' families have been waiting for justice to be carried out for nearly 20 years.

"I don't know if Dunlap is ever going to be executed," Sylvia Crowell, the mother of a victim, told ABCNews.com today. "Whether he dies from natural causes or from execution doesn't matter to me, but he better not leave that prison except in a pine box."

On a personal note here... and this is just me, and I'm not saying this for anyone else... I'm on the fence about capital punishment. I am neither for it or against it.

On the one hand... I can't possibly fathom, come to grips, or understand in any way what it must feel like to have a loved one die at the hands of a murderer. I can't. I think there's a certain level that your brain adjusts for and then accepts but murder of a loved one is off the charts. So there's no true understanding of that. I can't imagine how that feels. I can't imagine how that hurts. So I will never say that I'm against it because I can't possibly know how those family members feel and what will give them peace or justice.

On the other hand... I understand the saying "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." I feel that while someone who has murdered other people deserves every bit of capital punishment... I question my morals in whether or not we are no better than them when we say they die for it. It also can come across as playing God deciding who gets to live or die. It says on the death certificate for anyone who gets capital punishment that their cause of death is homicide. Sanctioned death doesn't seem to keep our humanity either.

So I'm on the fence. I don't think I'll ever be for it or against it for those reasons. I usually just avoid any one way or another on it. My two unneeded cents._________________I'm doing the twitter thing; you should stalk/follow me: http://twitter.com/sillygurlroo

I had family on death row. He was waiting to die for about 20 years, he wrote the family regularly. Every time his date came up some public defender that he didn't want would get his death postponed.

Instead he died in prison due to health reasons, a mix of them but I think it was pneumonia that finally did it. I kind of find that creepier then him being put to sleep. I guess you could call that a worse punishment, being left to rot in a cell by yourself for 20 years.

There was no doubt he committed the crimes, he bludgeoned a couple to death with a hammer (I think) and turned himself in when he sobered up.

In response to a petition, the Obama administration is backing expansion of Open Access policies for research conducted with public money. It also calls for more preservation of research materials, but doesn't promise any extra funds for doing so.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A high-stakes trial started Monday to assign blame and help figure out exactly how much more BP and other companies should pay for the nation's worst offshore oil spill.

Attorney Jim Roy, who represents individuals and businesses hurt by the spill, said BP executives applied "huge financial pressure" on its drilling managers to "cut costs and rush the job" before the blowout of its Macondo well triggered an explosion that killed 11 workers and spawned the massive spill. The project was more than $50 million over budget and behind schedule at the time of the blowout, Roy said. "BP repeatedly chose speed over safety," Roy said, quoting from a report by an expert who may testify later.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier said he would hear several hours of opening statements Monday and the first witness would take the stand Tuesday. Unless a settlement is reached, the judge, not a jury, ultimately will decide months from now how much more money BP PLC and its partners on the ill-fated drilling project owe for their roles in the 2010 environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

Roy said the spill also resulted from rig owner Transocean Ltd.'s "woeful" safety culture. He said the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig failed to properly train its crew, calling it a "chronic problem allowed by Transocean management to go uncorrected." "The workforce was not always aware of the hazards they were exposed to," Roy said. "They don't know what they don't know." Transocean and BP will make its case later Monday.

BP has said it already has racked up more than $24 billion in spill-related expenses and has estimated it will pay a total of $42 billion to fully resolve its liability for the disaster that killed 11 workers and spewed millions of gallons of oil. But the trial attorneys for the federal government, Gulf states and private plaintiffs hope to convince the judge that the company is liable for much more.

With billions of dollars on the line, the companies and their courtroom adversaries have spared no expense in preparing for a trial that could last several months. Hundreds of attorneys have worked on the case, generating roughly 90 million pages of documents, logging nearly 9,000 docket entries and taking more than 300 depositions of witnesses who could testify at trial.

"In terms of sheer dollar amounts and public attention, this is one of the most complex and massive disputes ever faced by the courts," said Fordham University law professor Howard Erichson, an expert in complex litigation. Barbier has promised he won't let the case drag on for years as has the litigation over the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, which still hasn't been completely resolved. He encouraged settlement talks that already have resolved billions of dollars in spill-related claims. "Judge Barbier has managed the case actively and moved it along toward trial pretty quickly," Erichson said.

In December, Barbier gave final approval to a settlement between BP and Plaintiffs' Steering Committee lawyers representing Gulf Coast businesses and residents who claim the spill cost them money. BP estimates it will pay roughly $8.5 billion to resolve tens of thousands of these claims, but the deal doesn't have a cap. BP resolved a Justice Department criminal probe by agreeing to plead guilty to manslaughter and other charges and pay $4 billion in criminal penalties. Transocean reached a separate settlement with the federal government, pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge and agreeing to pay $1.4 billion in criminal and civil penalties.

But there's plenty left for the lawyers to argue about at trial, given that the federal government and Gulf states haven't resolved civil claims against the company that could be worth more than $20 billion. One of the biggest questions facing Barbier will be to determine if BP was guilty of gross negligence. The Justice Department and private plaintiffs' attorneys have said they would prove BP did.

Under the Clean Water Act, which is designed to punish companies and prevent future spills, a polluter pays a minimum of $1,100 per barrel of spilled oil; the fines nearly quadruple for companies found guilty of grossly negligent behavior. BP, meanwhile, argues the federal government's estimate of how much oil spewed from the well — more than 200 million gallons — is inflated by at least 20 percent. Clean Water Act penalties are based on how many barrels of oil spilled.

In other oil-related news, fracking is the new glass beads, at least for some tribes in North Dakota.
Tribes In The Heart Of Fracking Boom Say Drillers Cheated Them Of $1 BillionBy Abrahm Lustgarten | Business Insider – 2 hours 20 minutes ago

Quote:

Native Americans on an oil-rich North Dakota reservation have been cheated out of more than $1 billion by schemes to buy drilling rights for lowball prices, a flurry of recent lawsuits assert. And, the suits claim, the federal government facilitated the alleged swindle by failing in its legal obligation to ensure the tribes got a fair deal.

This is a story as old as America itself, given a new twist by fracking and the boom that technology has sparked in North Dakota oil country. Since the late 1800s, the U.S. government has appropriated much of the original tribal lands associated with the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota for railroads and white homesteaders. A devastating blow was delivered when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1953, flooding more than 150,000 acres at the heart of the remaining reservation. Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes 2014 the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara 2014 were forced out of the fertile valley and up into the arid and barren surrounding hills, where they live now.

But that last-resort land turns out to hold a wealth of oil, because it sits on the Bakken Shale, widely believed to be one of the world's largest deposits of crude. Until recently, that oil was difficult to extract, but hydraulic fracturing, combined with the ability to drill a well sideways underground, can tap it. The result, according to several senior tribal members and lawsuits filed last November and early this year in federal and state courts, has been a land grab involving everyone from tribal leaders accused of enriching themselves at the expense of their people, to oil speculators, to a New York hedge fund, to the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The rush to get access to oil on tribal lands is part of the oil industry's larger push to secure drilling rights across the United States. Recent estimates show that the U.S. contains vast quantities of oil and gas. As fracking has opened new fields to drilling, and the U.S. has striven to get more of its energy from within its borders, leases from Louisiana to Pennsylvania have been gobbled up. Now the pressure is increasing on one of the last sizeable holdouts 2014 lands owned by Native Americans.

A review of tribal and federal records as well as lawsuit documents reveals a dizzying array of lowball, non-competitive deals brokered by numerous companies, often entwined with the tribal council and with individual landholders on the reservation. But at heart the alleged practices are simple: Tribal leaders and outsiders set up companies to buy drilling rights cheap and flip them later for spectacular profits 2014 in one case earning as much as a 200-fold return in just four years.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost," said Tex Hall, the current chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, in an interview. "It's just a huge loss and we'll never get it back."

At the center of that particular alleged scheme, according to one of the suits, was Spencer Wilkinson, Jr., longtime manager of 4 Bears Casino, a time-worn warehouse of slot machines, swirling cigarette smoke and stained carpets that serves as the reservation's entertainment nexus and its financial hub. Wilkinson also sat on the board of the tribe's development corporation, where he was charged with finding new opportunities to enhance the economy of the reservation.

According to interviews with tribal members, former employees of the Three Affiliated Tribes, and a class action lawsuit filed in federal district court in Bismarck, ND against Wilkinson and others, Wilkinson used his access to casino funds 2014 and to the development corporation 2014 to gain influence and craft an oil deal that would leave him one of the richest men on the reservation.

In 2006 he became an owner of a company, Dakota-3, with Richard Woodward, a white consultant who, records show, was receiving more than $20,000 a month from tribal funds for his work at the development corporation. Together, the suit and other legal filings allege, Wilkinson and Woodward planned to raise money and buy up rights to much of the remaining land not yet slated for drilling, all the while maintaining their work with the tribes and employing Wilkinson's relationship with the council to help get the oil leases approved.

Leases for oil rights generally work like this: A company purchases the right to drill for oil underneath an acre of land by paying a one-time upfront payment, called a bonus, and a percentage of the profits earned on the well, known as a royalty. On Indian lands additional laws also apply, dictating who can negotiate for whom and how the government has to oversee the agreements.

On one hand, it sucks that people got screwed. On the other, I'm highly opposed to fracking and the environmental damage it causes, so I don't feel too bad for them._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.https://www.facebook.com/O.A.Drake/https://twitter.com/oadrake

On one hand, it sucks that people got screwed. On the other, I'm highly opposed to fracking and the environmental damage it causes, so I don't feel too bad for them.

I must have missed something in that article, then; I thought it was the Three Affiliated Tribes that got screwed by oil speculators and drillers, and that it is those same oil folks who are using hydraulic fracturing to extract oil from the Bakken shale formation. Yeah, the guy at the heart of it all (Wilkinson) seems to be a member of one of the tribes, but the fact that he is screwing over his own people shouldn't be held against the people he's screwing, should it?_________________I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning

Well from what I got, they're upset (and the impending suit centers around this) because they didn't get enough money, not about the actually activity that was going on._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.https://www.facebook.com/O.A.Drake/https://twitter.com/oadrake

Well, true, that's disappointing, but understandably human. Let's see if the Tribal Leaders can pull their heads out long enough to figure out the true scam: "Wait! This isn't about shaNIstaaka taking our land! They have always done that; it is what they do. This is about taking our Mother and treating Her like dog meat! And we've been helping them to do this, because it's supposed to help us 'develop economically!' We develop by applying our minds, our hands, our strength, to improving ourselves, not by destroying from within the very land on which we stand!"

We can only hope that they wise up soon. If not, well, maybe, just maybe, just once, they'll manage to get a fair price for what's being stolen from them. But, like all theft, in the end, what has been stolen is gone, and cannot truly be replaced even by proper remuneration for its value._________________I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning

"Wait! This isn't about shaNIstaaka taking our land! They have always done that; it is what they do. This is about taking our Mother and treating Her like dog meat! And we've been helping them to do this, because it's supposed to help us 'develop economically!' We develop by applying our minds, our hands, our strength, to improving ourselves, not by destroying from within the very land on which we stand!"

hey is this some sort of comedy racism or is there some sort of culture barrier causing me to interpret your Tonto impersonation that way?_________________Once, at a local NOW meeting where I was the only male among about a dozen women, a feminism trivia contest was held. I came in third.

Surely the energy required to walk around randomly distributed piles of crap would outweigh the energy for vacuuming? Every time a cleanly person could just walk in a straight line you have to spend thousands of calories literally bending over backwards, folding your body into high-energy shapes just to get through the hallway